Art and Entertainment Design Class Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction

Fashion shows transport audiences into different universes, showcasing designers' work on models within a story-telling set.
The fashion show concept has evolved from solely advertising on mannequins to featuring real models.
Early fashion shows in Paris during the 1860s featured real models, allowing customers to see the rhythm and movement of garments.
English designer Gerard Verdict Worth is credited with purchasing Americans for real life models.
Worth hired young women, including his wife Maria Augustine Vernice (credited as the world's first fashion model), to model his collections.
These early shows, known as fashion parades, showcased designs to an audience.

Early fashion parades were small events, unlike the spectacles of today, lacking music, elaborate sets, or special effects.
However, these parades paved the way for the modern catwalk show.
Models in early shows wore wardrobe couture creations featuring rich fabrics and historical dress elements, bringing luxury fashion to women's minds.
Worth is known for pioneering critical fashion movements, including Haute Couture, and revolutionizing fashion as a business.
Lucy Cristina, Lady Doug Gordon (Lucille), is credited with creating the first catwalk show with scenic stages, music, special lighting, and models striking poses.
Lady Dove Gardens' approach transformed the fashion show into more of a performance than a presentation solely showcasing clothes.
She reviewed her collections at her shop in Hanover Square, Mayfair, London, inviting audiences to view luxury fashion creations.
Lady Dove Garden is known for her early runway shows, training professional models, and dressing high society in sleek skirts and low necklines.
French designer Paul Pourreit presented his designs on live bodies in action in the early twentieth century and is linked to the early development of house culture.

Poirier threw elaborate society balls to showcase his work, making him one of the first couturiers to use publicity as a marketing tool.
In 1911, he staged the Thousand and Two Nights custom party to launch his new branch of perfumes.
The party was Persian-themed, and the highlight was Poirier's wife, Denise, wearing his latest style of herring pants in a grill cage.
Poirier realized the power of social currency in marketing fashion.
Gabrielle Coco Chanel, the founder of the Chanel brand, ruled Parisian fashion in the 1900s.
Her 31 Rue Cambon apartment in Paris served as her home, boutique, and hause couture atelier, where she showcased her creations.
Chanel's signature styles incorporated elements of men's fashion, such as yearning trousers inspired by male sailors.
Her salon shows offered women versatile and practical ways of dressing.
Today, 31 Rue Cambon remains the epicenter of the House of Janels.
A fashion week is a week-long event where designers showcase upcoming collections.
Fashion weeks occur in major cities, with the most prestigious in New York, London, Milan, and Paris.
The first official fashion week, initially called Fresh Week, arrived in 1943 amidst World War II.

Due to World War II, Paris shows were canceled, and American fashion media turned to New York City.
Fresh Week became fashion week, with multiple fashion shows across the city, making it the first to organize seasonal fashion shows.
Frank Contrulla Pauls Parade is known as the king of fashion and led the fashion industry in the first decade of the 20th century.
Pauls Parade's work contributed to the first fashion editorial.
In 1911, American photographer at workstation shot Pourre's designs for Art and Decoration magazine, which became the first modern fashion photography shoot, promoting fashion as fine art.
The event paved the way for fashion editorials, now essential in fashion magazines.
Fashion editorials tell a story of the collection with their words and images.
The idea of the supermodel arose when models began taking big beauty contracts, making them stand out and bringing their faces to magazines, billboards, and the runway.
Evelyn Nesbitt and Leslie Hornby are associated with the world's first supermodel.
By the 1990s, the supermodel craze was in full swing, with models like Christy Tollington and Naomi Campbell becoming superstars and earning large sums.

Gianni Versace's fall 1991 show is an iconic runway show, epitomizing the 1990s supermodel era.
The finale featured Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington, wearing black, red, and yellow cocktail dresses and miming to George Michael's Freedom 90, an unexpected recreation of the original music video.
The show solidified the supermodel status in popular culture and merged the fashion show with the celebrity world.
It sparked the idea of the catwalk as a place to create an exciting media spectacle.
Stefan Beckman, a New York-based set designer, discusses his work on fashion shows, exhibitions, events, photoshoots, and commercials.
The creative process involves understanding the designer's inspiration and developing an idea for the season.
For the fall 2015 Marc Jacobs show, Jeremiah Goodman's illustrations of interiors inspired a blown-up, exaggerated version, with Diana Vreeland as the inspiration for a red garden in hell living room.

The Marc Jacobs show room was bathed in red light, with everything else in black and white, using theatrical drops painted in about a week.
For the H and M Alex Wang collaboration, extreme sports inspired an abstracted track.
Models walked around the track, and the scale was huge, creating a giant sports installation.
Parkour performers opened the show with acrobatics on trampolines and flips, followed by a Missy Elliott performance, turning the show space into a party space.
The Cloud set for Marc Jacobs fall 2014 featured a low ceiling, with the audience surrounded by clouds.
The design was inspired by soft sculpture 70s pop art, with 500 soft sculpture clouds made using spandex material.

The cloud runway was the longest ever done, spiraling through a maze of clouds with a front-row seat for everyone.
For Hermes in 2014, the project focused on women and what it means to be a woman.
The old JP Morgan space on Wall Street was converted into 20-25 different rooms, each offering a unique experience.
Performances occurred throughout the night, with some rooms offering food and drinks, representing different facets of Hermes.
The Hermes bracelets, being iconic, became one set.
The experience was surreal but celebrated Hermes' brand.
Stefan Beckman aims to curate an experience and do things he's never done before, challenging himself to make the job great.